rpg wrote:Lianne wrote:Gordafarin2 wrote:Yes, there are two main hurdles in listening comprehension - parsing the speech, and understanding the words. The first one can seem huge, but it's actually the easier of the two. If you expose yourself to comprehensible speech at native speed often enough (from a variety of different speakers, with different accents, in different situations, at different levels of formality), you'll train your ear.
In the last couple of years, my reading comprehension has progressed beyond what I had imagined possible, but my listening comprehension, not so much. So I have not found the "parsing the speech" part to be the easier part!! Although I think there is also the factor of processing speed, like how fast you can understand the words that you "know". That almost feels like it goes somewhere in between parsing the speech and understanding the words.
I feel like it depends a bit on your level as well. At beginner stages it's going to be more about the vocabulary since you simply don't have the vocabulary to understand a lot of what is said. At intermediate stages you may have more vocabulary problems with oral-specific vocabulary (which French has in spades, for example) when you're still new to engaging with authentic native speech. But in general I agree with you that the main difficulty with listening comprehension is parsing the speech; after all, that's the main thing that separates listening from reading, and missing vocabulary affects all four skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) equally--perhaps reading more than anything since a wider vocabulary is used in writing.
There are so many different dimensions of it too. Can you parse regional accents? The speech of a child? The speech of someone crying, yelling, or whispering? Speech with a lot of noise interference? Can you correctly parse where a word you don't know begins and ends / what the surrounding words are, vs the one unknown word messing up your parsing of an entire phrase?
Yeah, that definitely describes a lot of my struggles with understanding spoken French! Regional accents (I understand close to 0% of what my dad says in French), people not speaking clearly due to whispering, etc. (in TV shows that often makes me not catch things), noise interference (I don't even have good auditory processing in English, so yeah), separating unknown words from a long string of sounds (French in a nutshell right there!)...